In a post about Linda Ronstadt and the Aladdin situation, someone mentioned that the opening act for her show was the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performing Rhapsody in Blue and other Gershwin songs. It reminded me of this story, which in retrospect I find very amusing. As a much younger man, I was involved in a long term relationship that was about as empty as a relationship could be. She wasn’t a bad person, she just wasn’t really what I wanted and I wasn’t really what she wanted, and neither of us bothered to leave for a long period of time. It’s a fairly common situation, I think, but one that convinced me never to settle for that again (and I haven’t, believe me). Anyway, this is the story of the moment at which I had the blinding flash of insight that I was with someone I shouldn’t be with…

I’m sitting in my office doing some work and in the background I have some music playing, Marcus Roberts’ absolutely wonderful rendition of Rhapsody in Blue (which I also have playing in the background right now, not coincidentally). She walks into the office, stops for a moment behind me…..and says…

“Why are you listening to an airline commercial?”

As the old movie line goes, “And slowly I turned……”. My jaw was agape. And in that moment, this one thought just screamed at me from inside my head – what the hell are you doing with this person? Needless to say, I ended that relationship shortly thereafter. Not because she didn’t know anything about Gershwin, that was just the perfect symbol of the fact that we had absolutely no shared interests or attributes. I know John Gray thinks men are from Mars and women are from Venus (or vice versa, I’ve never read it and don’t intend to), but we weren’t even in the same galaxy. And after we broke up, my father’s understated response was, “Well I don’t mind saying that I was rather stumped by the whole situation.” Me too, Dad. Thankfully, I learned that lesson and thereafter kept searching until I got it right.

Your story reminds me of one from my own life. I was “seeing” someone who was an engineering student–a good guy. I felt terrible for not particularly liking him, but then I thought, “Well, he’s such a nice guy, maybe he’ll grow on me.”

Then one evening we were dancing to some really funky music. I was loving it, and in the middle of the song he says “I wish they’d play something that had a beat to it.”